Of course, that didn't include thousands of dollars in fees for tech consultants and hundreds of hours of in-house effort. Still, two years into operating the new Web site, Gow is quite satisfied with its consultant-management features. Prospective freelancers, upon visiting the site, see much more than a plain "E-mail your résumé" section. Now applicants complete a short checklist that gives Crimson more information about their potential value to the business. The checklist includes such items as which large high-tech companies they've worked for (Cisco, Microsoft, and so forth), industries they've worked in (handhelds or servers, for example), and areas of expertise (international marketing, trade shows, and so on).
Now all the information shoots right into Crimson's database, which is searchable not only by the above items but also by a freelancer's going rate and even his or her social skills. (Crimson managers can also add to the system any observations they've made from interviews and reference checks.)
After the company found out how to plumb its freelancer database more efficiently, it embarked on a Web strategy to find more workers. Gow retained three associates who now do nothing but scour the Net all day for prospective freelancers. The recruiters search on job boards, such as www.monster.com and www.hotjobs.com; on sites for independent professionals, like www.guru.com and www.freeagent.com; and on Bay Area job sites, like www.craigslist.com.
Since it revamped the Web site and database, Crimson's freelancer roster has shot up from 600 to 2,400; the list jumped from 1,600 to 2,400 in the second quarter of this year alone. Gow claims that handling such an influx would have been impossible without the new technology, which has allowed the Los Altos, Calif., company to deploy freelancers with ease, even as demand for their services has boomed. (The company's 1999 sales of $6.4 million were three times the previous year's figure.) And the new database allows for multiple searches, enabling all seven people in the company's consultant-services division to search simultaneously for freelancers to match clients' requests.
It's become so easy for the company to locate qualified consultants that Crimson has added a new marketing feature to its home page: a box in the upper left-hand corner that reads, "Do you need immediate marketing assistance? Click here." After clicking, potential clients fill out a form specifying their marketing need, which the consultant-services division can then process and respond to within hours. Such rapid response was unthinkable with the old system. But Gow and his staff decided to capitalize on their newfound deployment speed by offering "immediate" marketing assistance. According to vice-president of information services Joel Borden, the box leads to one new customer a week.
Instant gratification
A desire to give his customers more immediate assistance is what prompted Dan Gould of Synergy Investment (#219) to develop his company's Internet presence. By upgrading his Web site, Gould sped up his sales cycle, and now he closes a far higher percentage of his sales.
Synergy, based in Framingham, Mass., installs lighting systems that it guarantees will trim its customers' electric bills. Before the Web update, a Synergy salesperson would dazzle a customer with a presentation but wouldn't provide a detailed estimate of the costs and savings until a month later. By that point the customer could have either lost interest or moved, or the company could have been acquired, rendering the estimate useless.
Brainstorming about that problem with his board and employees, Gould hit upon the Internet as a possible answer to his lost sales. His sales force needed a tool that could help them close sales on the spot. If his salespeople could log in from customers' sites and provide reasonable estimates based on data they'd gathered that day in the field, then Synergy would win more sales and stop wasting time on detailed estimates for ultimately uninterested customers.
The difficult part was creating a Web-based program that could condense the estimate-generation process -- previously a manual procedure that took weeks to complete -- into a few minutes. Gould, who has so far spent $34,000 on the eight-month conversion, claims that the site, www.lightingbudget.com, has already surpassed his expectations.
Of course, the system still has a ways to go. The salespeople now use the site to produce estimates after they've returned to Synergy's headquarters rather than when they're out in the field with customers. Though that isn't how Gould envisioned the process, it is nonetheless a vast short-term improvement over the old system, since customers now receive estimates within 24 hours of a field visit. "As soon as we have confidence that all the salespeople can whisk through the program on the fly, we'll be logging in at client sites," Gould says. "We don't want them to fumble around in front of the customer." He thinks he's only a few months away from doing on-site estimate generation.
Gould projects that the site will "at least double" the number of estimates that the company can provide. That should lead to a substantial increase in revenues, especially if -- as he anticipates -- the percentage of sales that the company closes increases as its sales cycles grow shorter. And Gould is also happy about the labor time that the system frees up, now that the sales force no longer has to spend hours producing estimates by hand.
"There are so many better uses of a salesperson's time," says Gould. "We have a full plate of leads for them to follow up on."
Ilan Mochari is a reporter at Inc.
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